On not reading anything and my brain turning slowly into mush

I haven’t been writing. I haven’t been writing because I haven’t been reading. I haven’t been reading, or going to concerts, or to the cinema. I haven’t been to the theatre in 2011. My brain is atrophying. My only cultural activity in the last two months has been going to the opera.

I always get a reading block around this time of year. I wonder why?

Here’s my goal: by the end of May I’m going to finish some of the books I’ve read half of and then stalled at. These are:

The state in capitalist society – Ralph Miliband
Greed – Elfriede Jelinek
The intellectual life of the British working class – Jonathan Rose
Woman’s estate – Juliet Mitchell
War and peace – Tolstoy
The end of the peace process – Edward Said
The Penguin history of modern China – Jonathan Fenby
La Débâcle – Émile Zola
A tale of two cities – Dickens

You know what, when I finish that little lot I’m going to read some really short, fun books. Suggestions in the comments, please. I haven’t even included Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, which I’m a quarter of the way through, because it’s so enormously detailed I don’t think I’ll be able to finish it before Christmas. The first two hundred pages took me three months.

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4 Responses

I’ve been reading my way through lots of short books, mainly because I’m trying to get through some authors who wrote several short books – Conrad, Nabokov, Ballard, Greene. You have a lot of heavy stuff in that list, maybe you should mix it up a bit, refresh your mind. Try 36 Arguments for the Existence of God by Rebecca Goldstein (Stephen Pinker’s wife), or some Tove Jansson.

Hmm. Not sure I’m ready for a novel about the existence or otherwise of God, described by one C Hitchens as ‘Brilliant’. Have been meaning to get round to Conrad for a while though. What would you recommend?